


Storm of Spirits: The Reaping

by moriturus



Series: Storm of Spirits Universe [3]
Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/F, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24770878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moriturus/pseuds/moriturus
Summary: Continuing in the Storm of Spirits Universe, how does Anna use her vampiric healing powers in wartime? [one-shot, complete]
Relationships: Anna/Elsa (Disney)
Series: Storm of Spirits Universe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930960
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8
Collections: Storm of Spirits Universe





	Storm of Spirits: The Reaping

_Warnings: descriptions of bodily injury from wartime._

This story takes place in the Storm of Spirits universe. If you haven’t read it, it will probably not make a ton of sense, so start there.

FFN: www.fanfiction.net/s/13562654/1/Storm-of-Spirits

AO3: archiveofourown.org/works/23586097/chapters/56592682

* * *

# Storm of Spirits: The Reaping

_Saint-Lo, Normandy, France, 1944_

The doctors made the morning rounds, reviewing the clipboards of the wounded. A new trainload of injured had arrived from the front overnight, and the first order of business was triage. Dr. Charles Foster walked through Ward 22A, the large field tent with patients who had experienced severe injury and were unlikely to survive. Their encampment, set back a few miles from the battles at Caen, was the first station hospital on the front.

“Dr. Foster, we’re running out of space in 22A with the new arrivals. Do you want to move some to 23B until after triage?” asked the red-headed nurse.

Foster ran his hand over his balding head and looked at his clipboard again. “Yes, let’s move patients 14, 22, 29, and 31 to 23B. Their injuries are severe and I’d imagine sepsis will be setting in soon. Go ahead, Nurse Arendelle, and see to it that these orders are put in,” he said, handing a sheet of paper to the white-garbed nurse.

Anna took the sheet of paper and crossed the field of canvas tents to reach Lieutenant Colonel Brewer, the officer in charge of Wards 22-30. “Lieutenant Colonel, Dr. Foster asked that these patients be moved,” she said somewhat timidly, handing the paper to the bristly Army officer with a half-chewed cigar in his mouth.

“Hmm. They gonna live?” Brewer asked sharply.

“Dr. Foster believes sepsis is likely, sir.”

“Goddamn waste. We’re so short on space and supplies that men who might have a chance of surviving won’t because these men, God rest their souls, are going to consume vital resources. Tell me-” he squinted at Anna’s name tag, “Miss Arendelle, you’re new here, what would you choose to do?”

Anna paused thoughtfully. “Sir, our job is to save lives, to save as many lives as possible. I know it sounds cruel and harsh, but if one man who is almost sure to die could instead, with his sacrifice, save five men who might not die, then… I think you’d want to save the five men, sir.”

Lt. Colonel Brewer nodded. “Foster means well but he’s an idealist who thinks everyone can be saved and resources are infinite. Maybe that’s true at the hospital back in the States where he came from, but it’s not true in wartime. Move these men to Ward 27 instead.” Brewer wrote his instructions on the paperwork, signed it, and handed it back to the nurse with a grimace, knowing he was condemning those men to death, a death they should have earned on the field of battle rather than in agony at a station hospital that was little more than a campsite with cots.

Anna swallowed and nodded, then hurried off with the officer’s orders.

Ward 27 had a reputation at the hospital as the place where patients went to die. The most hopeless cases went there, soldiers so severely injured that medical personnel were frequently baffled how they even survived the journey from the front lines. Of the patients who ended up in Ward 27, fewer than 1 in 100 made it out alive - not for a lack of trying by doctors, just that patients were too far beyond help. The ward was so notorious that medical personnel hadn’t even bothered to put most medical supplies in the tent, just an extra sheet for each cot to cover the body when the inevitable occurred.

Once the orders were submitted, she started wheeling patients’ cots across the packed soil from one enormous tent to another. The first patient, patient 14, was comatose with severe head injuries, so severe that according to the records that accompanied him, a third of his skull was missing due to shrapnel. Anna reached out, gently extending her powers, and found that the man’s tether to his life energy was dwindling rapidly. He’d last maybe a day or two before his body simply gave out. She moved the bed in place in the empty ward, looked around for anyone else nearby, and touched the man’s skin, whispering in what sounded like an old European language.

“ _A te vér az én vérem, a szíved a szívem, az életed az életem. A lelked szabad, a test pihenhet. Menj békésen._ Your blood to my blood, your heart to my heart, your life to my life. Your soul is free, your body may rest. Go peacefully.”

Pale green energy drifted from the man’s skin into Anna’s hand, and he breathed his last breath. The energy flowed up Anna’s arm and dissolved into her chest. She sighed sadly and repeated the process five more times with the remainder of the nearly-dying patients. With the hospital so short-staffed, it wouldn’t be until the evening rounds that these patients would be checked and found dead.

Anna completed her orders and walked back to Ward 22, where the remainder of the new patients were convalescing. Dr. Foster assigned her to make rounds, checking charts and taking body temperatures.

At the first bed, she picked up the clipboard. “Sergeant Cole, 116th Regiment, 29th Infantry?” she asked quietly. “Yes ma’am”, came the muffled voice of the patient. His head was swathed in bandages, covering the upper half of his face, his nose and mouth unobstructed but little else. A tuft of red hair protruded from the top of the bandages. According to the chart, he had suffered severe eye injury from a grenade exploding nearby.

“How are we feeling, Sergeant?” she asked gently.

“Not too well, ma’am. I’m… I can’t see. Doc said I’ll never see again, and I…” the soldier paused, choking back a cry, wringing his bandaged hands together.

“Go on, Sergeant,” encouraged Anna.

“I’ll never see my girl again. I made it home, but I’ll never see her pretty face, her smile… she promised to wait for me and marry me when I made it back, and I… I don’t think she’d like to see me like this very much,” Cole said, pitifully.

“What’s her name, Sergeant?” Anna asked software, rubbing the soldier’s hands with her own.

“El- Elsie, ma’am. The sweetest girl in all of Centerville, Ohio,” he smiled wistfully. “Brightest smile you ever did see, and her hair looks like spun gold in the sunlight.”

Anna smiled. She’d already made her choice, but the coincidence of the name reaffirmed it. She looked at the injury diagnosis again. The eye injury was from shrapnel fragments, but the eyes themselves were mostly intact, just damaged. Recovery was theoretically possible. She picked up a morphine syringe from her supply cart.

“Sergeant, I’m going to give you some medicine now to help you sleep and ease the pain. Hopefully when you wake up, you’ll feel a little better,” she soothed.

“Th- thank you, ma’am. And, uh, if you could please not mention… uh, what I said, I’d much appreciate it. My mama didn’t raise a crybaby,” he muttered.

“My lips are sealed, Sergeant,” she said sweetly, pushing the dose of morphine into the intravenous drip. The sergeant’s breathing relaxed and slowed. Anna looked around; the other patients were also mostly asleep, and two nurses in the tent were walking away from her. She reached out and placed her hand on the man’s head and whispered familiar words. “ _Sângele meu la sângele tău, inima mea la inima ta, viața mea la viața ta. Mă doare ca să te vindeci._ My blood to your blood, my heart to your heart, my life to your life. I hurt so that you heal.”

The words she’d learned from Countess Dolingen and the demigod Maleficent flowed as easily as water now, having had decades to master them and fine-tune her abilities. She felt the energy she’d pulled from the dying patients flow slowly, gently into Sergeant Cole’s wounds. Most of his injuries would be temporary, save for his ruined eyes, so she closed her eyes and gently guided the golden light inside him to those eyes. Bits of shrapnel dissolved, tissues mended, lenses repaired, blood vessels made whole. She eased the rest of his injuries some, but left enough that he would still need time in the hospital for recovery. When the doctors removed his bandages in a week, he would miraculously have recovered.

She moved onto the remaining patients in the ward, identifying opportunities to heal that would reverse permanent injury where possible, where it wouldn’t be obvious that “miracles” had occurred. For every life’s energy she took from the hopeless, she could heal nearly a dozen others, sometimes more.

* * *

_Philadelphia, 1946_

Elsa sat quietly in the booth of the coffee shop, a copy of the Center City Times in front of her, as Anna chewed a pastry noisily. “Amthbgrf?”

“Come again, dear?” Elsa asked with a giggle.

Anna swallowed. “Anything interesting?” she asked, drinking her coffee. They’d just moved after the war so that she could investigate working at Philadelphia General Hospital. After her stint in wartime service, she wanted to work with younger patients and had heard good things about the pediatrics program at Philly General.

Elsa shrugged. “Not especially. Mostly just news about the presidential convention coming to town next month.” She took another sip of her tea, Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy playing on the radio in the background.

The coffee shop door opened, the bells chiming loudly against the glass. In walked a well-muscled red-haired man with a drop-dead gorgeous blonde on his arm. The couple walked up to the counter, ordered some breakfast, and moved to sit down at the next booth over when the man stopped.

“Is that you, Miss- I mean, Nurse Arendelle?” the man exclaimed.

Both sisters looked up, Elsa with caution and Anna with glee. “Sergeant Cole!” she shouted, standing up quickly to shake his hand. Bits of pastry crumbs flew all over the table. “How have you been? You’re looking well!”

“I am, thanks to you and your care, ma’am. Oh, excuse my manners. Nurse Arendelle-”

“Anna, please!”

“Anna, this is my wife, Elsie!” he beamed. The woman, initially suspicious, had relaxed and extended her hand to the redheaded woman, as Anna’s sister quietly smirked into her tea.

“A pleasure to meet you. Harold said that you helped save his eyesight after the doctors said he’d never see again,” she purred, her golden hair glowing in the morning sunlight.

Anna chuckled. “He did all the hard work, Miss Elsie. We just made sure we got as many obstacles out of his way as possible. So nice to meet you!”

Sergeant Cole moved to usher Elsie to the booth near the sisters, but paused to shake Anna’s hand one last time. “I didn’t want to say it too loud, but thank you for all you did overseas. I can’t wait,” he practically bubbled, “to see my son’s face later this year. Thank you again, Miss Anna.”

Anna sat back down, smiling at Elsa. Moments like this were what she lived for, the chance to use her powers to do good in the world, to make lives a little bit better. Elsa briefly took her hand, patted it gently, and nodded ever so slightly.

“You did good, sis,” she whispered, smiling as she turned back to her paper.

* * *

## Author’s Notes

What would a demigod with vampiric healing abilities do during wartime? How would someone like that use their powers without going noticed and without abusing their powers? They’d use them cautiously, carefully during periods of great tumult, and give back nearly as much as they took. That’s how we ended up here when I asked myself, what will Anna do with her powers during big events like the World Wars?

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### Join The Party

Enjoyed this story? Want to meet fellow readers and discuss? Join the Elsanna Shenanigans community on Discord at discord.gg/TU9NpnH (copy and paste that URL for AO3 friends, go to discord dot gg slash TU9NpnH for FFN friends).

As always, please review, kudos, comment, like, follow, all that good stuff. I appreciate it.


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